...Here are some things that we plan to do to make our online secular community a place where we can exchange ideas and views instead of insults...

• Moderate blogs and forums...
• Go offline before going online: pick up the phone...
• Listen more...
• Dial down the drama...
• Be more charitable...
• Trust but verify...
• Help others along...

...By improving our online culture, we can make this movement a place that engages, fulfills, and welcomes a growing number and increasing diversity of secular people...

[Signed]
...Ronald Lindsay, President and CEO, Center for Inquiry

But it's the second misapplication of the concept of privilege that troubles me most. I'm talking about the situation where the concept of privilege is used to try to silence others, as a justification for saying, "shut up and listen." Shut up, because you're a man and you cannot possibly know what it's like to experience x, y, and z, and anything you say is bound to be mistaken in some way, but, of course, you're too blinded by your privilege even to realize that.

This approach doesn't work. It certainly doesn't work for me. It's the approach that the dogmatist who wants to silence critics has always taken because it beats having to engage someone in a reasoned argument. It's the approach that's been taken by many religions. It's the approach taken by ideologies such as Marxism. You pull your dogma off the shelf, take out the relevant category or classification, fit it snugly over the person you want to categorize, dismiss, and silence and ... poof, you're done. End of discussion. You're a heretic spreading the lies of Satan, and anything you say is wrong. You're a member of the bourgeoisie, defending your ownership of the means of production, and everything you say is just a lie to justify your power. You're a man; you have nothing to contribute to a discussion of how to achieve equality for women.

I have to disagree with a lot of this. Ron, what about when people are dominating the conversation and refusing to let women discuss these ideas by talking so damn much and not letting women actually do any talking themselves? Can a woman tell a conversation-dominating man to shut up and listen to them? That's sort of the problem here, you know. The problem your conference is trying to defray.

It didn't help that the opening remarks (by a bearded white guy, no less) were basically a high five to the people trolling the con — Ron Lindsay tut-tutted the attendees for using the concept of privilege to shut down conversations with…who? The thugs who hate the whole idea of Women in Secularism? It was the most inappropriate, uninspiring, wrong-headed conference opening ever. The director of CFI trolled a conference built by his own organization, and offered words of encouragement to the people trying to disrupt it!

...a number of people took strong exception when I expressed concern during my talk that the concept of privilege sometimes was being invoked to tell people to "shut up and listen."

Tweets during and after my talk complained I offered no specific examples.

...[N]owhere in Lindsay's speech did he mention feminists like Jen McCreight, who has been so bullied and harassed that she did in fact quit attending conferences and she quit blogging and being active on social media in the hopes the anti-feminists would finally leave her alone. They didn't. That is silencing...

When faced with my criticism of his tone deafness, Lindsay didn't hesitate to include me in the list of feminists trying to shut him up. He seems to be confused, assuming any discussion about how race, gender, and other attributes influence our outlook and our biases is a call for people of privilege to have no say. This is quite obviously absurd...

It's a shame that with so many wonderful, inspiring women on stage at this event, the gut feeling I'll be taking home is yet more disappointment and disillusionment in the leadership of the organized secular/skeptic movement.

Rebecca Watson inhabits an alternate universe. At least that is the most charitable explanation I can provide for her recent smear. Watson has posted comments on my opening talk at Women in Secularism 2. It may be the most intellectually dishonest piece of writing since the last communique issued by North Korea.

No extended argument or analysis of this issue is needed, and I do not think the choice could be starker. Either you believe reason and evidence should ultimately guide our discussions, or you think they should be held hostage to identity politics.

It is perfectly legitimate to tell someone to shut up when you've heard their voice in a thousand variants many times before, and you need some small space in which to express yourself, too. This conference should be that space for the many who have been shushed.

Furthermore, shutting up is actually a great thing to do sometimes. You might learn something if you do. I know–it's worked for me.

I had a crowd of people descend on my hotel room after the evening's events at Women In Secularism and a good day of wonderful and inspiring talks from strong women, and besides just wanting to talk and celebrate, they wanted to complain. These are people who came here for a conference on women's issues, and they were really annoyed that the head of CFI, Ron Lindsay, chose to use the opening talk of the conference to basically chastise the attendees and instruct them in how to behave, and I've had more than one person tell me that they were irate that their introduction to an event that they paid a considerable sum of money was to be greeted by a talk that pandered to people who hated the event, and were volubly complaining on the internet throughout the day about it. The impression they had was that the organization was unhappy to be sponsoring this conference.

His job was emphatically not to begin the conference by haranguing a feminist audience about what he sees as the deficiencies in modern feminism, and then, when he received a wave of fully justified and deserved criticism for this, to respond immediately with a barrage of personal attacks directed at one of his critics, who happens to be an invited speaker at the conference to boot!

Somehow he has managed not to hear what we've been saying over and over and over. Something he's been doing–or not doing–has kept him from picking up this information that, as the speaker opening this conference, is crucial.

I could speculate about what that is, but Lindsay used his position to tell me that this is unwelcome.

[Linday's lecture] was a poorly expressed, poorly timed message delivered by exactly the wrong person for the message.

For stating that, I have been accused of being sexist, of having it out for men, for having it out for Ron Lindsay, of quote-mining, of being dismissive, of shutting down dialogue by calling people names, and just good old "fuck you" and "fuck off" from strangers. I am dogmatic and hateful and trying to tear people down.

...As the CEO of CFI, his job is put the best face of the organization forward and offer leadership people can unite behind. (Needless to say, he's also there to make potential donors more eager to give money.) Instead, he hijacked a conference that was supposed to be about highlighting women's voices in secularism, and made the conversations mostly about a man's anger that men are sometimes asked to follow the ordinary rule of human discourse to listen to the evidence before you render a judgment on it.

In doing so, he angered many prominent and important members of the secularist community and I suspect embarrassed his staff, though anti-feminists who have spent years harassing and abusing women for daring to promote a feminist view of secular activism were delighted.

This was Justin Vacula's response [to Amanda Marcotte] on twitter:

Get out, Amanda, you not welcome here. Take your dogma elsewhere (you too, Ophelia)

This is the same guy who couldn't get anyone to pay attention to him at the Women In Secularism conference — we had more interesting people to talk to — so he spent his Saturday doing an interview for that misogynist hate site, A Voice For Men.

If Ron Lindsay was opening an NAACP conference, he'd be the guy who's like, "Welcome! WHERE'S WHITE HISTORY MONTH?"

There was an interesting (in the Minnesotan sense of "interesting") thread running on the Women in Secularism hashtag briefly during the conference. According to people who weren't there to hear Ron Lindsay's opening speech, criticism of that speech was "biting the hand that feeds" us. Fascinating, isn't it?

The implications for what those tweeters believe are just a wee bit staggering. First of all, the majority of those complaining about Ron's remarks were paying customers. A conference like this isn't something an organization like CFI pays for out of the goodness of its heart. It's a promotional event.

Some people have considered the recent criticisms of the CEO of the Center for Inquiry to be a wholesale attack on the organization (well, "some people" meaning "freakin' loons"). Nothing could be further from the truth. I'm a supporter; I think many of their causes are essential; I appreciate the work of many of the people there. Let's not forget that the whole of the organization is not the brain of the CEO, whether it's Paul Kurtz or Ron Lindsay, both of whom have also done good work. We have to trust in the quality of the group to overcome the flaws of the individual.

So I thought I might throw out an occasional post to let you know about a few of the commendable efforts of CFI — you know, try a little positive reinforcement in addition to my usual spiked bludgeon of criticism.

...[W]e're the bullies. Never forget that. We use our immense ruthless power as bloggers to argue with other bloggers, while poor tiny powerless meek obscure humble shoemaker Richard Dawkins simply tries to stamp Rebecca Watson into the ground a little bit more by re-posting Ron Lindsay comparing her to North Korea.

We're the bullies. How does that work again?

Not having seen an apology, retraction, or other followup to these official communications, we are forced to arrive at several conclusions:

• that Dr. Lindsay's actions are endorsed by the CFI Board of Directors as consistent with its mission and expectations of leadership
• that CFI supports ad hominem attacks on individuals who disagree with CFI staff
• that CFI is content with its limited diversity and doesn't value the support of Secular Woman or our thousands of members and supporters
• that Dr. Lindsay's, and by extension CFI's, endorsement of the Open Letter, which Dr. Lindsay's blog violates in every way it could, was a sham

The CFI Board of Directors and CEO Ron Lindsay are aware that his recent talk and blog posts have generated much debate and discussion. CFI & Board are in ongoing discussions over this matter, which will be also be considered at Board's regularly scheduled June meeting. Further comments on this issue will be made once the Board has had an opportunity to discuss and consider it in full.

Lindsay could fix this. He could start listening instead of ignorantly preaching about what he knows little about and offending and outraging half his constituency. He could also take criticism seriously, as an opportunity to improve his organizational message, instead of dismissing that criticism as North Korean propaganda. He could do all that. But he does not appear to be trending that way. And I cannot see that as a sustainable behavior if he hopes to keep his job.

I pity the poor sod who has to wade through and moderate all the comments over at CFI’s blog. Frankly, they’ve got possibly the worst job in the world right now. However, I’m going to push that fact aside for a moment, mute that in-built empathy for my fellow human being for just long enough to complain that they’re not actually doing that job to any degree one can call reasonable.

If you have something to say about Ron Lindsay's insulting and contemptuous talk at the Women in Secularism 2 conference, and/or about his insulting and contemptuous follow-up post responding to the controversy... say it to the CFI Board of Directors.

Don't just say it on Twitter, or on Facebook, or on blog comments, or even on your own blog. Say it to the people who can do something about it. If you’ve already said something on some other forum, please copy and paste it, edit as appropriate, and send it to the CFI Board of Directors.

...I found a home in CFI and did the best I could to make it a great one.

This is why I was so thoroughly disappointed in the actions of Ron Lindsay this past weekend at Women in Secularism2. To watch the CEO of the organization I've come to love undermine all the work his female employee, Melody Hensley, had done, use his position to belittle a room full of people who paid to attend a conference about women, personally welcome a known harasser, thereby validating all the harassment and abuse women have been getting, and throw a temper tantrum when faced for criticism of it all was maddening.

I cannot keep putting my time and effort into an organization that condones such behavior from its leadership.

In my blog post of May 18, I complained about Ms. Rebecca Watson's characterization of my May 17 talk. In doing so, I expressed my points in intemperate language, e.g., the comparison of her blog post to a press communication from North Korea, and for that I unqualifiedly apologize. This apology has been conveyed to Ms. Watson.

...

As to my May 17 talk, I have nothing to say. The CFI board will decide whether my talk was contemptuous of women, as some have alleged, misrepresented CFI's commitment to women's rights, or in some way committed CFI to a course of action inconsistent with CFI's mission.

No, Ron did not apologize to Rebecca. He notpologized for his "intemperate" language. He's apologizing for picking up the wrong fork while ignoring that he puked in the soup tureen.

[T]his particular straw feminist is one of the most commonly-used ones by the most hostile opponents of feminism. This is one of the chief anti-feminist talking points: that feminists are hostile to all men, that we’re uninterested in the experiences of any man, that we think everything men say about feminism is wrong, that we don’t think sexism affects men or that feminism has anything to do with them. This image of the ball-busting, man-hating feminist is one of the primary ways that feminists get demonized, marginalized, trivialized, and ignored.

To hear it coming out of the mouth of the person hosting the Women in Secularism conference, in his welcoming speech to the conference’s speakers and attendees and financial supporters… it was appalling. It was reprehensible. It treated us with contempt.

I will make this very clear: I don’t think Ron Lindsay consciously intended to treat the attendees and speakers at Women in Secularism 2 with contempt. I just think he didn’t particularly care. And that, in itself, is a serious form of contempt. He treated the very people the conference was being held for as trivial, far less important than him getting to use our platform to spout his opinions. He treated the women at that conference — and the men and non-gender-binary people — as if the patronizing insult he had to know we would take from his talk, and the derailment of one of the few events we have that’s specifically devoted to our concerns, was obviously of less concern than his own personal opinions about our work. He took the space that was set aside for us, and he used it against us. And he did this with no apparent concern for how this might affect us.

He treated us with contempt.

If Ron Lindsay had chosen to simply post this talk on his blog, totally separate from the Women in Secularism 2 conference, I don’t think there would be this level of fury, disappointment, and sheer “What the hell was that?” shock. I think a lot of people would have been angry and upset: but I don’t think the conversation about it would have been eating the Internet.

But that wasn’t the context in which this happened.

And the context in which this did happen was reprehensible.

He treated us with contempt.

And it is absolutely unacceptable.

Ron Lindsay owes every person at that conference, and every feminist in the secularist movement, an apology. And it needs to be a real apology. It cannot be a bullshit, half-assed, “I’m sorry you were upset by my entirely reasonable actions,” “I’m going to spend one sentence apologizing with ten paragraphs on defenses and excuses and counter-accusations” not-pology. It needs to be a real apology. It needs to demonstrate an understanding of what exactly was wrong with his actions, and a promise to not act like this in the future. If he doesn’t, I think it will be very hard for feminists in the secular movement to trust and support CFI again.